Still lots of hits and runs, but a lot fewer homers at Coors Field

Even 10 years on, it’s still just about the most pitch-to-pitch fun you can have with a baseball, but without an environmental storage chamber.

The Colorado Rockies could charge admission for pre-game hitting at Coors Field. Just change the name from batting practice to Home Run Derby and print tickets by the thousands. Heck, players would probably pay big bucks to step in the cage for B.P. in the Mile High City.

“Especially the interleague games, where guys come in who’ve never played in Denver before,” said Jason Giambi, now a grizzled veteran in his third season with the Rockies. “Baseballs are flying out of the place left and right. They’re hitting ’em up into the concourse (in left), hitting ’em up into the third deck (in right), thinking they could do that all day long.”

And then, yes, inevitably, here it comes. The game.

“Guys are still swinging with everything they’ve got, but all of a sudden, nobody’s hitting it up into the third deck anymore,” said Giambi. “They’re not even hitting it out of the park, period, as much anymore.”

No, they’re not.

As you may have surmised, the difference is that B.P. baseballs used by the Rockies and visiting teams at Coors Field are not those closeted away in the ballpark’s ESC, better known as “the humidor.” Only for games are the baseballs maintained separately at 75 degrees and 50 percent humidity allowed to come out and play.

Coors Field, where the Padres return yet again tonight for the start of a three-game series in the National League West Division, remains the majors’ highest-scoring ballpark on a near-yearly basis. But the humidor effect, introduced in 2002 to counteract the dry, thin air of the Mile High City, has done much of its job. That is, it’s keeping the ball in the ballpark.

Unless they someday put a big-league franchise on the moon, it’s highly unlikely there’ll ever be a home run ballpark like Coors Field was in 1999, the year a record total of 303 homers were struck by teams in Rockies home games. In the Rockies’ first seven seasons there, from 1995-2001, there was an average of 3.2 homers hit in games at Coors Field. Consequently, the average number of runs was a pinball-like 13.8 per game.

“So many times, you’d just sit there and let ’em whack away for seven innings, analyze it and ask yourself the question: Is there a game to be managed, so to speak?’ ” said Rockies manager Jim Tracy, recalling his many visits to Coors as skipper of the Los Angeles Dodgers or Pittsburgh Pirates. “Things have changed dramatically. It’s a baseball game now.”

A game in which an average of 2.31 homers were hit last year. Indeed, Denver’s downtown ballpark seldom ranks among the first five locales in the majors for total home runs. Nor is it even considered the homer haven of the NL West, a title that’s been transferred south to Chase Field in overheated Phoenix.

“The ball’s not flying the way it used to,” said Aaron Cook, who’s spent his entire 10-year career with the Rockies. “It plays fair now.”